2000 polling venues

Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem updates the media on the September election. Picture: JONE LUVENITOGA

SEPTEMBER'S general election will, for the first time in Fiji's voting history, have 2000 polling venues.

And about 16,000 highly trained officials will be stationed at these venues to assist the voting public.

Elections Supervisor Mohammed Saneem said officials would soon identify areas where people would go to cast their votes.

"Each person will be able to vote at a polling station that they are assigned to," Mr Saneem said.

"We will allocate a person to a polling station according to the address that the person gave us at the time of their registration with us. If you have registered with us and subsequently you have changed your address, you can correct your address with us or change it with our system by going to the nearest permanent registration centre."

He said once the registration was updated, voters could then vote at their nearest polling station.

"The 2014 General Election has come up with a new term — polling venues. I'd like to explain polling venues, it is a location that contains one or more polling stations.

"With this new system of voting where there is no constituency, there is no ethnic-based voting, everybody has to vote in the same ballot paper, so, there is a big crowd of people at certain locations.

"What we can do is split the crowd, we split the crowd probably by your surname and by doing that, we create more than one classroom in which you can vote."